Bethanie's Brain

Added a new link to Brain Food and I have to say it's there in large part because of the picture at the top of the page. Follow the link and check it out: Fond of Snape It's one of those 'pictures worth a thousand words', you know? And honestly, I don't know that given a thousand words, I could even do it justice. But it's one of those things, like certain songs, that trigger something in the brain and before I know it, events, worlds, whole people start whispering to me and wanting their story told. I've also added the link because Fond of Snape is a kick-ass photographer and lives near Boston, the coolest city in America (if you ask me, which you didn't, but whatever), so her posts are sprinkled with the kind of snark and sarcasm that you just can't find anywhere else, plus she mentions places I've been to or lived in all the time. *sniffs* I'm so homesick now. .

I recently added a link to Lynette R Cook's Extrasolar Planets page under Brain Food, because, well, it's just damn cool. In the Time Before Children, I spent many chilly hours in my backyard with my telescope at night and many more hours (rather warmer ones) reading about extrasolar anything . The very idea of planets orbiting another star has been fascinating to me since the first time I saw Star Wars. So when I started writing fiction again a few years ago, the idea of an almost-but-not-quite Earth-like world was a natural springboard. Right about that same time there were a bunch of news reports on a whole new batch of extrasolar planets that had been discovered. In one of them was this image: That one image spawned a whole world. A world in which half the night sky was taken up by this enormous red 'moon'. A world in which the rest of the night sky, and some of the day sky, hosted a parade of smaller moons. A world which would be subject to the massive magnetic...

I was planning on posting an updated one-sentence summary for my dragon murder-mystery story today, but Ms. Five has been home sick for two days, and at the moment I’m tired and grumpy and can’t stand the sight of my own writing. So I’m going to talk about somebody else’s writing, instead. (Yes, I’m copping out. Get over it.) “Somebody” is Joely Sue Burkhart, whom I recently added to my “Brain Food” list. In a word, Joely is great. Her blog has become required reading for me, not only because of posts like the one I found so inspiring the other day , but also because of her snippets, which appear fairly regularly and are awesome. Especially the ones about Gregar. :-D Joely is a fantasty-romance writer and does a lot of things really well - many of them things I wish I did well and don't (yet). World building, for instance. The best word to describe it is deft. As a reader, you are imperceptibly drawn into the worlds her characters inhabit until you are there , no info-dump nece...

This post kicks off a(nother) new label for me: Annotations . I've been wanting to do this for a while, because I never like to just add links to my blog without explaining why they're there. And why in world would I want to do that? Well, I guess it's because I only add stuff I think is worth checking out, which makes Annotations my bid to convince you to check these links out, too. Right. So, on with it, already: For a number of reasons, I've been making an effort during the past few weeks and months to seek out other writers' websites. One reason is that I'm seriously thinking through putting together a website focused on my own writing (and another for my fledgling freelance medical editing service), so I'm looking for ideas, Do's and Do Not's, cool features - that sort of thing. Another reason is that other writers are a fantastic source of inspiration, ideas and insights. Plus, many of them post excepts and snippets of their writing, whi...